So I was searching Amazon for a projection alarm clock. This little beauty was getting 10 stars from all of it’s Amazon reviewers but it was sold out. And so started my quest to own one: I searched for the make and model number and found an identical listing with no reviews. I checked model numbers and it’s exactly the same. A link to the one I bought is below. It’s the latest version of this product and it get’s great reviews in the ghost listing. The other listing is sold out so I advise you to jump on this before it goes the same way.

What do I make of it? Well, I have not looked back. It projects beautifully and clearly without being too bright a slight adjustment on the manual focus to get a brilliant display on the ceiling. Me and my wife can set separate alarms, the alarm rises slowly and does not disturb our toddler in the next room. We never need to set it because it gets the time from a radio signal.

Those reviews are available here: RM308P Reviews

So I needed to replace BMW Bonnet badge on my car and it actually turned out to be a little less painless than I thought it would be.

In the interest of keeping the blog flowing and interesting I will be sharing some things about my life. Hints and tips for my hobbies and projects as well as the usual heartfelt confessions of my failing diets and exercise  regimes.

First of all I ordered a new roundel from my favourite shop Amazon (Pick a region):

Then, follow these precise and easy instructions.

Now the car has a new lease of life.

Buff-Daddy

I hope to take the bike out tomorrow or maybe pop over to the gym. The calorie intake needs a serious rethink. I welcome any suggestions. My friend is doing the Paleo diet. Seems like fun.

Now, a few years later and she has done what I am blogging about now and turned her body into what you see below. It’s an incredible achievement and should be celebrated. I for one will be checking out her trainers home page and trying a few things myself.

I caught the article on the Mail Online website.Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Jodie Marsh Bodybuilder diet

She was once famous for her curves, making a name for herself as one of the country’s foremost glamour models.

And now Jodie Marsh’s body is making the headlines once again – but for very different reasons.

The 32-year-old star was seen showing off her muscular new body as she entered the Natural Physique Association (NPA) Mike Williams Classic and Pro-Am Bodybuilding Championships last month.

Who’s that girl? Jodie Marsh showed off her amazing new look at a bodybuilding championships after just eight weeks of training

Jodie Marsh Bodybuilder diet proving too hard to dismiss

Buff: The 32-year-old former glamour model has gone from a size 10 to a size six, and from 25 per cent body fat to 10 per cent body fat

Jodie looks completely unrecognisable after undertaking a gruelling diet and exercise regime which has seen her go from a size 10 to a tiny size six.

Talking about her new figure, Jodie said: ‘This is the best I’ve ever felt, and the best my body has ever felt too.

‘In just 50 days I have gone from 25 per cent body fat to 10 per cent body fat, gained 8 pounds of muscle, and lost 20 pounds of fat. In 8 weeks I have achieved what normally takes 6 to 9 months.’

Sharp, who says on his website that he can help you achieve a six pack ‘in weeks’, worked with Jodie to achieve her dream figure in a journey which has been documented and will be shown on DMAX show Jodie Marsh: Bodybuilder, due to premiere in January 2012.

On his site, Sharp says: ‘I can transform your body in weeks NOT months or years! I have 24 years experience as a trainer so your assured to be inspired and you will get amazing results fast.

‘If you want maximum fat loss in weeks, look no further. The world’s best athletes and celebrities trust me to get them in shape fast.’

Buff Daddy wants to know how long it will be before we see Jodie Marsh Bodybuilder diet DVD’s and perhaps a Jodie Marsh Bodybuilder frying pan set? hehe, only joking, there is a TV series coming out in January. I hope to get a few tips from it. January seems so far away though.

via Jodie Marsh shows off her amazing new look as she makes her bodybuilding debut | Mail Online.

Diet Turkey Recipe

Diet Turkey Recipe

Enjoy this diet Turkey recipe I put together from bits I found online and some experimenting.

Serves 6 people

Preperation: 10 minutes

Cooking time: 35 minutes

SECRET INGREDIENT: coffee

Boneless, skinless turkey breast halves are readily available and are ofter pretty cheap in comparison to other meats. As a result they always seem to lack in flavour. With this diet Turkey recipe you will be injecting some much needed flavour into the meat so when it comes to eating, you will feel like you are eating a juicy beef steak with a 1 inch thick piece of fat attached. Well, maybe not that good but it’ll certainly improve the flavour.

What’s even better is you can do the prep work earlier and cooking is just slamming it in the oven, fire and forget style, so it really suits people with busy lives. It’s a diet Turkey recipe for people that want to gobble gobble and go. :/

The brewed coffee creates a hearty marinade here that imparts tonnes of flavor in a short time.

Ingredients:

• 3/4 cup brewed coffee
• 2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
• 1/8 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1 1/2 pounds boneless skinless turkey breast
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Preperation

1. Score the Turkey slightly to allow the marinade to collect.
2.  In a medium bowl, combine the coffee, vinegar, garlic, sugar, olive oil, Worcestershire sauce, and cinnamon. Transfer to a large zip-close bag and add the turkey. Refrigerate at least 2 hours, or overnight, turning occasionally.
3. Preheat the oven to 220°c (425°F). Coat a rimmed baking sheet with cooking spray.
4. Remove the turkey from the marinade, reserving marinade, and sprinkle with the salt and pepper. Place the turkey on a wire rack on the baking sheet.
5. Roast, brushing with reserved marinade every 10 minutes, until an instant-read thermometer inserted into the thickest part of the breast registers 165°F, about 30 minutes. Remove from the oven.
6. To finish, Preheat the grill. Grill the turkey 5 inches from the heat until nicely browned, 1 to 2 minutes. Let stand for 5 minutes before slicing.

So don’t be a Jive Turkey, Enjoy my Java Turkey, ya hear?

Enjoy the recipe

Buff Daddy

But then there’s a black hole between Friday night and Monday afternoon. This weekend was filled with crisps, pizza and beer in incredible amounts. Oktoberfest hit Shoreditch this weekend so I had a few Steins of lager in a large tent with an Oompah Band keeping everyone dancing on the tables. A guy on the table behind fell off his table and had to be stretchered out by medics. It was wild!

I have input my entire shame into DailyBurn and because I rather stupidly forgot to eat, I still remained 3 calories inside my daily intake. I doubled the carbs and halved the protein but otherwise it didn’t ‘look’ to bad to the casual observer.

Now, I have been out of whack all day with this hangover. but here’s my vow! I hereby promise to get the most out of the gym this week and I will give my bicycle a good thrashing round the streets of London as a means of amends.

Biking has to be  my favourite workout. Especially road biking around London.

Here’s the article:

One Downside to Bicycle Commuting: Biker’s Lung

If you bike to work, you’ve probably got pretty nice thighs. Your lungs, though, may not be in such great shape.

New research has found that bicycle commuters inhale more than twice the amount of black carbon particles as pedestrians making a comparable trip. That healthy bike ride to and from work might be getting you out of a car, but it’s not getting you out of the way of the automobile emissions.

The study, led by Professor Jonathan Grigg from Barts and the London School of Medicine, looked at bicycle and pedestrian commuters in London to determine whether different modes of travel exposed commuters to higher levels of black carbon. By comparing levels of carbon in the lungs of five healthy bicycle commuters to the levels of five healthy pedestrian commuters, the researchers found a large disparity. The bicycle commuters had 2.3 times more black carbon in their lungs. They claim that the probability of this happening by chance is less than one percent.

Fuel-combustion creates this black carbon, or soot, which can be inhaled and which persists in the lungs, creating potential health risks. Following on the hypothesis that bicycle commuters’ heavier breathing would expose them to more of the particulate pollutants created by fuel-burning traffic, the researchers were relatively unsurprised by their results, which were presented at this weekend’s European Respiratory Society’s Annual Congress.

“Our data strongly suggest that personal exposure to black carbon should be considered when planning cycling routes,” said Dr. Chinedu Nwokoro, one of the researchers in the study and an active cyclist. “Whether cycling by healthy individuals is in itself associated with adverse health effects is currently being assessed in a larger ongoing study.”

via One Downside to Bicycle Commuting: Biker’s Lung – Commute – The Atlantic Cities.

Hope this tip was of some use to you all

Keep it buff
Buff-daddy

In these posts categorized as ‘The Site’, I will discuss some of the hurdles in setting up the site. Here I am going to let you know my findings with some of the WordPress plugins. First up:

Hackers Diet Plan

This had no screenshots and the instructions were pretty vague. The standard wordpress installation process was used. upload the folder to the plugins folder on the server and activate through the control panel.

Thoughts

It really says something when the person whole wrote a plugin can’t be bothered to screenshot it when putting it on the WordPress site. It really smells of unfinished. Unsurprisingly it is… unfinished. The author looked like he had best intentions. He asked for feedback etc but the last update to the pre version 1 plugin was 5th May 2007. Version 0.9.8b

If you just want to be able to track your weight inside that admin console for WordPress then you are in luck. You cannot edit older dates than a week. but as long as they are entered correctly you have a nice little trend bar and a target date and/or weight. That’s it. There’s Widget to install but it just displays an error even when data is inserted:

I would go on from here but by the time I had collected all the screenshots and tested it I felt that even the author gave up on it before it was finished so why should I go on. Here’s all the bullet points I was making whilst testing it, I will ditch the screenshots as I don’t think it warrants further review. I will try another widget and move on.

Bullet points:

• If you skip a day it doesn’t pad the graph (Even though it says so in the description)
• All it does is weight. (Would have liked to have seen BMI etc)
• It’s only in lbs (Come on, kgs and Stone man? include the rest of the world)
• Editing historical data is not a function yet. (This can be annoying if a mistake is made and not noticed for a while)
• Difficult to find where to configure it. You need to understand widgets and then the control panel is hidden away. PS: It’s directly under Dashboard > Hacker’s Diet Menu

Enter weight in the Hacker's Diet menu directly under Dashboard

Verdict:

How did this get 5 stars? It’s completely unfinished. It could have been great but it’s a very long way off usable. If I want a chart that only I can look at that doesn’t pad out days without entries, I would have used excel on my local PC. The Hacker’s Diet Plan can be found here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/the-hackers-diet/

1 star out of 5 i’m affriad

BD

Let’s see what obstacles life wants to throw at me and what I need to do to overcome.

By way of confession here is today’s munch:

Breakfast: Bowl of Sugar puffs, skimmed milk.

Lunch: Double cheeseburger & Bottle of Fanta

Tonight’s diet: Stir fry turkey, Peanuts, 2 pints of beer.

Nobody’s perfect!… yet!

In all fairness, this is probably the best I have done in a week. Yesterday was a bacon double cheeseburger & a pizza.

BD.